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Up coming nerf to turn in contraband assignment
sqwished
Member Posts: 1,475 Bug Hunter
Why do you (Crypric) think this is a good idea? Especially when there are so many bugs currently affecting both the duty officer system and admiralty system. Well we've got rewards from negotiate additional delivery of rare commodities whose actual reward is obsolete. There's the issue with the sector blocks borders that's still out standing. And then there's the issue with certain admiralty ships being duplicated. None of which have been resolved. But yet you find time to nerf a single mission for reasons unknown!
Oh, it's not broken? We can soon fix that!
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In addition to "anti-farming" (common by devs in any mmo), it also addresses the oversupply of dilithium which has caused zen exchange rate to sky rocket. Which has come down though for the moment.
Also if the dev's where so intent on reducing the amount of dilithium being generated within the game. Why did they feel it necessary to add dilithium rewards to almost every facet of the game in the first place. More over why bother adding the dilithium rewards to the admiralty in the first place?
What the hell do you mean "anti-farming", this whole 'game' is just one big farming mission! With Admiralty and mining, the devs are discouraging people to do STFs and instead just sit in sector space and do DOFF and Admiralty missions! They just like to have full control over everything we do in this game.
Assuming they actually go along with this, the very least they could do is allow us to turn in contraband from anywhere. Not go to a particular place that has security officer and turn it in there. It's not like it doesn't make sense anyways: you're the captain of a starship, you should be able to order someone to take a shuttle and turn it in!
Yes and no.
Many many moons and fora ago, I remember reading from one of our esteemed Devs that they desire to have a "set" earning rate of Dil per play-hour.
Something on the order of 3.5 to 4 hours of day for one character to reach max dil refining (cap). Therefore, the Devs sorta believe/intend that outside of events, no player should "generate" ~50k unrefined a day over 6 toons. And this is the "I never sleep" rate.
Contraband "skirts" this issue. Buy up / farm massive stacks of contraband, and now you can generate cap on a much higher amount of toons via each alt performing a what, maybe 5 minute (run to bank, withdraw contra, run to security dude, start mission) character visit once every 4 hours - which means cap out in a 16 hour "day", letting you sleep as well as max out more than 6 sets of refining...
"Earning rate" may have changed, but the intent (not having 10+ characters hitting cap by running through them with 4 hours or so max playtime spaced apart an hour every 4 hours...) hasn't.
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
But it doesn't, if anyone has spent enough time in game, and actually bothered to learn the game systems then it's easy to max out the daily dil cap without relying on contraband turn in's. I've never turn over contraband on my main, yet I have enough unrefined dil to hit the refining cap each day for almost two years. That's without turning in any excess marks that I'll be accumulating through running the queue's.
And I'll agree that those that farm on what could amount to an industrial scale may pose a problem, this doesn't do anything to negate the problem, that's even if there is one, and as of yet no one has provided rock solid proof of this. All of heard is nothing but speculation and wild supposition. All this doesn't do anything to reduce the amount of Dilithium in the game because people will just work around it.
It's bad enough those of us that have spent time and in some cases money building our admiralty deck collection only to be told, oh yeah by the way we're (as in Cryptic) are now limiting how fast you can progress through the admiralty campaigns because we feel your going to fast. Whats next is Cryptic going to limit how many mission we can run in a day regardless of how many ships we have access to? because it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Also given how long the duty officer system has been running, only now do they feel this particular assignment is an issue. I think goes to show just how much insight they actually have into their own game. If it was a big of an issue as they and other players would have some of us believe, why wait til now to do anything about it?
They are not removing contraband "farming" but slowing it down to once per day rate. Thus discouraging people from creating characters that do nothing but contraband to dil, ie. actual farming, not grinding/farming while still playing the game otherwise.
Isn't this the second or third time They have fiddled with it anyway?
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Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Oh, it really does. You're thinking of a player with single character. My main is the same as yours with a lot of unrefined dili sitting around. The problem is people are lazy or have other priorities than 'playing the game the right way'. They want success fast, experience everything with as little effort as possible and have variation on their playstyle.
All this can be achieved if your have the monetary means, be it ingame currency such as dili or ECs or Zen (which is a lot more directly tied to real world currencies [excluding the stipends here]).
Contraband farming is simply the easiest way of gaining Zen, which can be exchanged to EC (via fleet modules or lockbox keys).
I personally don't like to farm, but have build up around 14 characters that will do just that. During this dili weekend alone i made an easy 2 million dilithium whith exactly 3 days of farming done by 9 of those 14 characters (this includes dili from the admiralty system and mining claims).
I know people in my fleet who do this 'professionally'. People who have multiple accounts who just farm and generate dili to be traded into zen. That's multiple account of 40+ characters. The system has been refined to no end and with just a few clicks (or maybe running a macro [which is illegal ...]) they can generate amounts that a 'normal' player could only dream of.
Then there are whole fleets who do this on an even larger scale.
The admiralty system can't really be automated unless you use a more sophisticated bot, which is a larger initial investment (cost to set this all up). Playing the game (ie running queues) is the intended way of earning dilithium. The only other easy way that comes to mind would be the dyson battle zone, where you have to actaully be good to earn a decent amount, so that would be out of the question for mass farming.
All that i want to convey with this wall of text is, that something had to be done about contraband farming. At least hot it is happening on a large scale. I would have preferred a limit to dili generated by contraband or some kind of trade exeption put onto that sort of dili. Everything else will just benefit players with multiple alts and accounts over new or 'casual' players even more. What everyone will do now is just increase their character and account roster and click through all those contraband missions once per day instead of 3 or 4 times. Also the price of contraband will likely halve itself, so farming it won't really be much of an issue anymore.
Please don't presume to tell me what I'm thinking. I was referring to one of a possible 9 toons on my account, With the exception of my Temporal recruit, each of my other toons hit their refining cap through other means essential doffing, admiralty and various queue's which generate the particular marks I require to progress toons through the various reputations.
So let me address the points in the last quoted portion,
1/ The entire game is and always has been one big TRIBBLE grind fest. So call it what you will, you call it "farming" I call it "Grinding" to get what I need.
2/ yeah people will just roll more alts to work around the problem, personally if Cryptic doesn't see this well then.... [redacted]
3/ Cryptic seem intent on driving down the market in game, NADORC used to generate the majority of my in game income, followed by Contraband and Gamma Quadrant commodities.
- Rewards from Nadorc is now obsolete under the new excuse for a R&D crafting system there are no need for the Alien Artifacts.
- Since Nadorc is obsolete, it has resulted in less demand for the Gamma quadrant commodities, although I'll concede that during my last bank dump it was evident that they'd pulled some of their prices back.
- Pretty much the only thing that has maintained it's price on the exchange is contraband, but this is now at the lowest price I've ever seen it, and as you say the nerf will have a knock on effect to reduce the the price even further.
4/ I beg to differ on the farming issue, it'll still be prevalent in the game. As we both agree on people will just roll more alts to compensate for the nerf. Roughly the same amount of contraband will still be used and the same amount of dilithium will be generated.
5/ If something had to be done, then instead of essential punishing everyone else, Cryptic should start targeting the "Professional" farmers as well as the bot farmers and other exploiters in the game. Then maybe just maybe things will start to balance out.
We need to also look at the average player which doesn't play as much and has a relatively low igname income. Those are the ones that make up the largest part of the playerbase. Players like you with 9 fully played toons are rather rare to see.
But we all know that Cryptic's goal isn't player retention or they would have done something about the whole situation a long time ago.
On the flipside, it's really easy to get a new player started by letting him do contraband farming. You get 4(5?) character slots for free and can easily have multiple accounts set up. Level your characters to level 12 and you're good to go.
That's the crux of the whole situation. How can you control the professional farmers and leave the average joe alone.
People suggested limiting the amount of dili an account can create -- easily circumvented by having multiple accounts due to the game veing free to play and having no rule stating otherwise.
Make the dili not tradable through the dili exchange -- it will simply take longer for a character to afford a zen item that sells on the exchange not impacting the overall performance across all characters/accounts.
The process of aquiring or converting contraband has to be made more playtime intensive for professional farmers to be dissuaded from farming contraband on such a large scale. The doff system and the admiralty systems come to mind.[/s]
First off, I echo the question of others in this thread: is this 2 years of unrefined earned through strictly / primarily playing your "main" and your alts still highly dil-poor, or are you capable of sustaining this rate on 12 or maybe even 48 characters?
Because if you do the math, assuming 5 minutes a cycle, you can pull of 12 toons in one hour of "contraband turning in", if this is the only thing they really do. And you need to pull off this cycle 4 times in a day (say 8A, 12N, 4P, 8P) to reach cap. So, if you're willing to do nothing but contraband turn-ins from 8A to 12 Midnight, that's 48 characters that you maxxed out dil on. If you want to try to farm the contraband yourself (and/or take breaks) for an hour each cycle, you can still pop 36 toons/day. Not only are these numbers far less than the max amount of toons on an account, but 36 contraband farmers can earn 2 years worth of a single character's dil refinement in something like 21 days - 365/35 (not counting the "main") = 10.4something days worth of the army's work = what one singular toon does in one year.
And on the whole "why is it an issue now" question: Consider that despite this dil farming rate, the market stayed "relatively stable" in the 200s to 300s till just recently, and spiked all the way to flirt with 500 just on the strength of the amounts of refined dil in the market along with the sudden desire to acquire lots and lots of zen for temporal agent ship packs and other zen based stuffs.
Neverwinter tought Cryptic that it's not good for the market/game to let the exchange even flirt with cap, as soon as the "value" of the zen goes over what the market's capped to allow, the market evaporates until such time as the "value" is returned to numerics that the system can handle.
So, something's got to give, and it seems that the proposed change to contraband has the potential to torch any sort of "professional" or even "semi-pro" farmer's production lines, is a simple "delete 4, insert 20" type change (or add cooldown=16) so it's not going to require tons of editing or potential bugs, and doesn't "really" harm the traditional player's means of acquiring "legitimate" amounts of Dil through "regular" play...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
And how it would effect people would depend on:
What were people buying with all that Zen converted from Dilithium converted from Contraband?
I guess, we will find out, shortly.
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
I was thinking on this again. If i follow my train of thought it would be better to lower the cooldown of the contraband mission and reduce the rewards accordingly. Probably in the range of 1 hour per mission, costing 1 or 2 contraband, with a range of 250 to 400 dili earned. This would put the max dili earned at 6000 to 9600 per day. That's if a player would actually use the mission every hour over a full 24 hour cycle (most likely less due to the time cost of actually pressing buttons etc.). It would also be easier to identify bot users due to the number of cycles they would have to go through.
You see someone has already found one possible work around.